Palestinian political leader Mustafa Barghouti accused President Joe Biden on Wednesday morning of believing the Israeli government’s “lies” about who was responsible for Tuesday’s horrific explosion at a Gaza hospital as a way to get re-elected.
Appearing on CNN, Barghouti blasted Biden for telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it “looks like it was done by the other team, and not by you,” when the two met in Tel Aviv on Wednesday afternoon.
The Israeli military denied that an Israeli missile was the source of Tuesday’s explosion that killed hundreds of people, instead pointing fingers at a failed missile fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group.
“You know, with all due respect, I see that President Biden only cares about one thing, which is getting re-elected, and that’s why he’s siding with Israel,” said Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative.
“He believes Israeli lies, like the lie about child beheading, which has never been verified, or the lie about raping women, which has never been verified, and they continue – and now this lie about Palestinians committing suicide,” Barghouti added.
Palestinian political leader Mustafa Barghouti accused President Joe Biden on Wednesday morning of believing the Israeli government’s “lies” about who was responsible for Tuesday’s horrific hospital explosion in Gaza as a way to get re-elected
President Joe Biden (left) hugs Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu (right) as he lands in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. Biden indicated at the top of their meeting that he believed the Israeli narrative that a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible for the Gaza hospital explosion.
Initial reports of Hamas’ brutal terror attack on October 7 included stories of the beheading of Jewish children and the rape of Jewish women – which have since been disputed.
Now the main factual dispute in the war between Israel and Hamas is over who was responsible for the horrific Gaza hospital attack, which Biden said he was “deeply saddened and outraged about” in his opening statement during his meeting with Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, the IDF released an audio clip of two suspected Hamas terrorists discussing the explosion.
“They say (the rocket) belongs to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Is it ours?’ asks an alleged Hamas member in the Israeli military intelligence clip.
“It seems so,” replied the other. “It misfired and fell on them…God bless, couldn’t it have found another place to explode?”
Barghouti argued that no Palestinian group had the firepower to cause the carnage seen after the blast.
‘Of course I wasn’t there, but I have the people, my people are there and they told me that the type of airstrike they saw in this hospital was exactly the same airstrike they saw in other places,” he said. told CNN’s Phil Mattingly.
‘Another fact, in addition to what I said before, is that the type of explosion that occurred after the Israeli airstrike is a type that no Palestinian missile could ever have,” Barghouti added.
He called for an “international, independent commission” to investigate the source of the hospital massacre, but then said Israel would never support it.
Israel would never do that allow an international investigation, as they never allowed an investigation into the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh. Because you can’t let the criminal do his own investigation,” Barghouti said.
Barghouti pointed to the killing of the Palestinian-American journalist last year as evidence that the Israeli government could not be trusted.
“We urge you to remember that the Israeli military lied to the world many times before changing their stories many times,” he said. “A very good example of this was their denial of the murder of Shireen, the American-Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, changing their story four times.”
Abu Akleh was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier while covering an attack on a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank.
Israel claimed it was possible she was killed by either side, before admitting she was “accidentally” hit by Israeli forces.
“Today they have already changed their story three times, but the world doesn’t notice,” Barghouti claimed. “I don’t believe any of this nonsense because there are a lot of facts here,” he added.
The hospital explosion sent Biden’s trip to the Middle East into a tailspin as his summit in Amman, Jordan with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was canceled as Abbas was set to return to Ramallah for three days of mourning for the victims of the hospital explosion.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said aboard Air Force One on Tuesday evening that Biden would hold a phone call with the leaders attending the Jordanian summit — Abbas, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi – about his return flight to Washington.